Ben Kilminster is a friend and a distinguished colleague working for the CMS and CDF experiments. Besides being a long-time higgs hunter, having sought that particle for over a decade in the two mentioned experiments, Ben is a veteran of science outreach since for many years he has published summaries of CDF results for the public on the online magazine "Fermilab Today". When I saw him posting on a social network an earlier version of the text below, which I liked a lot, I asked him to make it a guest post entry for my blog, and he graciously agreed. The piece is titled "How The Universe Works - in Ten Sentences". Thanks Ben!

I mark with a * some logical leaps that scientists make.

The
universe began*, and when it was just a 10 billionth of a second
old, and about 100 trillion times hotter than today, the weak nuclear
force that mutates matter into other types of matter and
the electromagnetic force that attracts charged objects spontaneously
broke apart.

At some point in these first
moments, matter became favored* over anti-matter, and as the
universe grew colder, bound states of quarks were created from
the strong nuclear force, producing protons which later attracted
electrons through the electromagnetic force to make hydrogen.

Due
to a large amount of an unknown component* of matter called dark
matter, hydrogen clumped into various scales of structure, which
later collapsed into clusters of galaxies and galaxies within them.

Another unknown
component* of energy kept the universe expanding at ever increasing
speeds, resisting the gravitational urge to collapse everything, but
meanwhile the hydrogen in the galaxies was gravitationally collapsing
into stars.

The stars burned for a while
using the weak nuclear force to produce energy to avert their total
gravitational collapse, but finally ran out of hydrogen, and the
extreme pressure of the collapse fused hydrogen into heavy elements
while blowing up the stars.

The
stars coalesced again with hydrogen and these heavier elements, and
began burning again, providing tremendous heat and gravity even hundreds
of millions of miles away, while some of the ejected material
was attracted into stable structures, gravitationally bound to the
stars, called planets, composed of metals and other heavy elements
that made them heavy enough to attract an atmosphere and provide lots of
elements for molecular structures.

In
planets far enough from the stars for liquids not to freeze or
evaporate, the heat and elements started chemical
reactions which produced complex molecules, and as the molecules
starting interacting, more complex molecular chains were formed, and
eventually generated structures which were capable of replicating.

The successful
chains continued to engulf other materials to sustain their
growth*, and life was born, competing until some of them were dominant
over the others, successfully garnering more of the molecules available,
and over time, some living structures began to work together
forming more complex structures in order to eat more stuff, and
reproduce themselves, using a detailed molecular plan of their
properties.

Finally, the complex structures began asking silly questions like how the universe works in less than 10 sentences.